The Playbook of the Western World(s)

What is it about Westerns? 

From Yellowstone (and offshoots 1883, 1923 and counting) to The English, Renegades to Longmire, even the Aussies have got in on the act with Territory, starring no other than Robert ‘Walt Longmire ’ Taylor himself, effortlessly switching his grizzled High Plains Wyoming diphthongs for his native, non-rhotic (but equally grizzled) Antipodean.

Personally, I can eat these series up in a single sitting.  Having survived my own personal Oregon Trail, from deepest, darkest Parsons Green to the wilds of Wimbledon Common, I feel an innate and immediate kinship with the frontiersmen of the Old West.  Like so many of my generation (and postcode) I can easily identify with the liminal fantasy of the Western Hero, The Man With No Name, existing somewhere between the wilderness and civilisation (or at least South Kensington). Even at school, when the other kids were swirling Superman capes and hurling Batarangs in the playground, I was kitted out as ‘Kit Carson,’ in authentic fringed polyester buckskin, courtesy (I learned later) of the Trafford Mail Order Catalogue. (If Father Christmas is so smart, why did he keep getting my size wrong?)

So when I heard that a stage version of the Fred Zinnemann classic, High Noon, was coming to town, I snagged a ticket faster than a diamond back rattler on roller-skates.

Zinnemann and I go back a long way.  When The Ladd Company* were bankrolling Fred’s last film, Five Days One Summer, they asked me to write a short ‘taster’ of the script that they could share with visitors to the set.  This was a bit of a coup for a lowly Story Department Reader, so I set about the task with a vengeance.  Only I couldn’t make head nor tail of the screenplay, even after the third reading. Ladd Co. then gave me the novel on which the script was based to read. Maiden, Maiden by Kay Boyle, and I was still none the wiser.

“I’m sorry, I told our London VP-of-Something-or-Other, “I haven’t got a Danny La Rue.”

“That’s okay,” they fessed up, once I’d explain the drag-act-based rhyming slang,

“We don’t have a clue either.  Just make something up, David.” 

So I did. 

Subsequently, when the film’s middle-aged protagonist, Dr. Douglas Meredith (as portrayed in the film by Sean Connery) stares adoringly across at his loving, much-much-younger lover/niece, the couple: '…share a special look, the air heavy with a certain something.'

And three single-spaced A4 pages of highly-charged, atmospheric, pure/impure fabrication were duly, and unashamedly, handed out at the studio.

Two years previous it had been High Noon itself that had been the problem.  Or rather the Ladd Co. sci-fi version, Outland, with Connery starring as a Federal Marshall policing a mining colony on Jupiter’s moon, Io.  A rogue manager has been pumping the workers with stimulants to boost their work rate, regardless of the drug’s psychotic side-effects, and when Marshall O’Neil puts his foot down, a shuttle-full of hitmen are dispatched to, well, dispatch him. 

When I read the script I had a flash of genius (or so I thought).

“What if O’Neil, outgunned and outnumbered, shoots up before the shoot out, and uses the stimulant to help even-up the odds?”

“No way!” our VP-of-Something-Else spluttered her pepperoni pizza across the ping-pong table. “I like my good guys good, and my bad guys bad.”

The film didn’t bomb, but it didn’t set the world(s) alight either.  So after the West End opening, complete with Io, a giant glowing balloon-moon, hovering over Leicester Square, I casually mentioned my idea to our supreme VP-of-Everything-UK-and-Europe.

“That’s a brilliant idea." he immediately replied. "It would have totally made the film. Why the Hell didn’t you tell anyone?”

“Well…” 

Back on Earth, the 1952 original movie had no issue with embracing moral ambiguities.  In fact Zinnemann, and Hollywood itself, were all about more nuanced Westerns at the time, as Thomas Schatz points out in his classic work Hollywood Genres:

‘As American audiences after World War II became saturated with the classic Western formula and also more hardbitten about sociopolitical realities, the image of the Western community changed accordingly, redefining the hero’s motivation and his sense of mission. Hence the “psychological” Westerns of the late 1940s and the 1950s that traced the Westerner’s neuroses (and eventual psychoses) stemming from his growing incompatibility with civilisation as well as the cumulative weight of society’s unreasonable expectations.

One of the more notable examples of this development is Fred Zinnemann’s High Noon, in which a local lawman (Gary Cooper) awaits the arrival of outlaws bent on avenging his having sent their leader to prison.  The wait for the arrival of the outlaws provides the dramatic tension for the film, which is heightened by the fact that the townspeople ignore or evade Cooper’s appeals for assistance.  After he and his Quaker wife (Grace Kelly), a woman committed to non-violence for religious reasons, finally confront and dispose of the outlaws, Cooper throws his badge into the dirt and leaves the community to fend for itself.’

I was four years old when I first (knowingly) watched my first Western movie, the epic How The West Was Won, presented in stunning ‘Cinerama’ to the Badlands of Putney.

And I’ll probably sit glued to more successive iterations of Yellowstone.  Even when the series runs out of history and takes flight into Sci-Fi, probably landing, hooves-first, on Ganymede or some other outlandish moon of Jupiter.

Truth to tell though, I did have a slight sense of foreboding about seeing a classic Western performed live on stage in Piccadilly.

But as the cowpokes always say, “There never was a horse that couldn’t be rode…” 

Now unlike a lot of stage adaptations from well-known movies, High Noon at the Harold Pinter is a piece of pure theatre, unapologetically letting the crisp and comedically counter-punching script, and sublimely talented cast, carry us deep into the heart of the drama, with music, instead of CGI, to help set the scenes …so saddle up now, Pard, before it sells out.

Yee-ha!

DT 9^th January, 2026

*High Noon, staring Billy Crudup and Denise Gough is playing at the Harold Pinter Theatre until March 7.

**The Ladd Company was of course founded by Alan Ladd Jr, the Hollywood colossus behind Star Wars and Alien, Blade Runner and Braveheart, among other game-changing movies, whose dad, Ladd Snr, starred in one of the most celebrated and highly regarded Westerns of all time, George Stevens’ Shane.